MySpace Boots 29,000 Registered Sex Offenders. Now If Only I Knew What That Meant.

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July 25, 2007

MySpace Boots 29,000 Registered Sex Offenders. Now If Only I Knew What That Meant.

The Reuters report on MySpace's eviction of 29,000 registered sex offenders hits the highlights:

"Popular Internet social network MySpace said on Tuesday it detected and deleted 29,000 convicted sex offenders on its service, more than four times the figure it had initially reported."
"'The exploding epidemic of sex offender profiles on MySpace -- 29,000 and counting -- screams for action,' Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said in a statement."
"As of May, there were about 600,000 registered sex offenders in the United States."

So about five percent of the registered U.S. sex offender population was hanging out on MySpace. The Guardian calls it a "mass infiltration".

Some headlines have changed "sex offenders" to "predators," which underscores Reason Online writer Kerry Howley's point about "the enormously elastic definition of sex offender," made last year:

One such case is Wendy Whitaker, who performed oral sex on a 15 year old boy 10 years ago, when she was 17. Whitaker owns a home near a church daycare center in Georgia; police forced her to leave that home last year. She then moved in with her brother, whose niece will go to school next fall. Since a school bus will pick up her niece from the house, Whitaker will again be in violation of the law if a new bus stop zoning law passes. According to the Southern Center for Human Rights, which is fighting the Georgia legislation, thousands of people will be forced to move if the law takes effect. Twenty-five of those are in nursing homes.

In February, USA Today said the "registered sex offender" designation tends to "dump all sex offenders together, even though some are child rapists and others may be 18-year-old men who had sex with underage girlfriends. There is no national breakdown of sex offenders by severity of their crimes."

The paper further noted that some jurisdictions include urinating in public as a sex offense requiring registration.

If you feel like following every one, you can check out a list of links to each state's requirements for registration. Not all of them work, some don't really list the criteria. What you will gather if you eventually stumble onto a page that includes the pertinent legal code (like Oregon's statutes, section 181.594) is that some registered sex offenders probably need to be registered as a matter of public safety, while others probably don't. You'll also learn that some states (Oregon, again) take the extra measure of designating some sex offenders "predatory" depending on the nature of their crimes.

The elasticity of the meaning of "registered sex offender" is a policy debate for some other blog. Having satisfied my curiosity regarding just who MySpace kicked off its service yesterday, I'm here to note that we'll surely be seeing more and more legislation aimed at curtailing online privacy in the name of "stopping predators," and this particular story will be cited to justify a lot of police and prosecutorial overreach.

Seems like a real breeding ground for unintended consequences to me.